Start To Finish: Mixing Rock With Vance Powell

Analog Mixing On A SSL Console

Grammy winner Vance Powell walks you through his entire mixing process, taking his production from a great sounding rough to a finished mix using his SSL console.

Learn Vance’s mixing philosophy and tricks that help him achieve a killer mix quickly and his workflow secrets that give him a flexible sonic palette to work from on every mix.

Whether you work in or out of the box, this tutorial is your chance to see how a Nashville legend approaches the mix from not only the technical point of view but also adds creativity and energy to the song Aftershock by Tyler Bryant and the Shakedown.

In this tutorial you’ll learn how Vance:

Sets up and aligns his console’s gain stage so his starting point give him the maximum flexibility later on

Uses effects sends and busses to route audio to parallel processing as well as reverb and delays

EQ and compression settings that add attack and life to drums and guitars

Sends certain tracks off to the “magic bus” for enhanced stereo processing and tone

Combines clean and overdriven vocals to give Tyler’s vocal the perfect amount of bite and presence to pop through the mix

Pro Tools tricks to help his tracks hit the console in just the right way

Tweaking the phase alignment of the bass amp and DI tracks

Automation passes using the SSL console's VCA automation computer

Monitoring level advice for various stages of the mix to give him the energy and details he needs to hear without ear fatigue

Mix bus processing and taking the time to compare the API 2500 to the SSL Bus compressors

Tweaking the mix with the band and preparing alternate mixes for mastering

Be sure to watch Part 1 and Part 2 of Vance’s Start to Finish series to see the entire record making process including tracking, production, overdubs, and editing.

Then download the raw multitrack files so you can translate Vance’s mixing techniques to your setup and practice mixing professionally tracked and produced material.

00:00:37First thing I usually do:
'Save As' to a different mix number,
just so we leave
the tracking session as it was.

00:00:44Okay, so after I 'Save As,'
next thing I'll do is duplicate
our print tracks.

00:00:49That's so we can have
the Rough Mix available
without having to change playlists.

00:00:54It will just all be there.

00:00:56And I'll take the current 'Save As'
and I'll just copy and paste that in
just for time's sake.

00:01:04Those are our new print tracks.

00:01:06When it comes time,
that's all set up for Vance to access.

00:01:10This is nice because we've tracked it,
so, like Vance was saying,
certain things land on certain
places on the desk.

00:01:17So, rather than getting a mix
that we haven't done tracking,
a lot of our outputs are just gonna
already fall where they need to.

00:01:25So, first thing I do is set up the tape.

00:01:34Cool.

00:01:37And then I usually write the artist
here in this little blank spot
next to the VCA groupers.

00:01:44So I'll do a line,
I'll do 'Tyler Bryant.'
A little ampersand,
and 'The Shakedown.'
Alright, and then the title of the track,
'Aftershock'
in quotes.

00:02:11And then I'll do
the mix number. Mix 1.

00:02:15And then the date.

00:02:17Year-month-day.

00:02:2028th.

00:02:21Just enough room there. Cool.

00:02:23So I know vocals are always
gonna fall here.

00:02:27And then we have our little vocal auxes.

00:02:31Vance will get into more
detail about that.

00:02:34We basically a Crush track and a Clean.

00:02:37Those are gonna fall on 31-32.

00:02:40As you can see, I imported those
from our previous session.

00:02:43That's kind of our go-to
vocal chain there.

00:02:46And then I'm just gonna start
from the other end here
and work my way down.

00:02:50So,
I'll go down here to the rooms.

00:03:09And then, Noah.

00:03:14All his BGVs,
and I'll make an aux for this
just so Vance can kind of blend
all of these together, individually,
into the aux.

00:03:25He can overdrive it if he wants,
or get a nice balance,
and then they'll come out
of this stereo pair. Cool.

00:03:3129-30.

00:03:32I'll just do 'Noah BGV Bus.'
I always Solo Safe the buses
so that Vance can solo individual things
and not have to worry
about soloing the aux as well.

00:03:48So, next we'll do the groupers.

00:03:51So I'll pretty much just go down in order
with these little...

00:03:55little counters here.

00:03:57So I just go around,
make all the drums 1.

00:04:01So that means, when I push these up,
I can have all the kit,
all the channels,
all the tracks for the drums
right here, centered at my fingertips
so I don't have to move
all the way down here,
so that's nice to have that function.

00:04:19For this part, normally,
we have like keys or something like that,
but this is all guitars,
so I'm gonna individually assign guitars.

00:04:27So, we have...

00:04:29We'll make Tyler,
his main guitar parts on 3.

00:04:33We'll just do 'TB' here.

00:04:36And we'll do Graham's main guitar parts
on 4.

00:04:42Intros...

00:04:465.

00:04:48Sometimes you gotta spin these guys
a little way around, or the other way.

00:04:53And then I'll probably have the solo
on its own individual,
so we'll do...

00:04:59We'll do guitars here,
designating all the other parts,
all the overdubs that we did.

00:05:06And then, we'll do solo here.

00:05:09As 6.

00:05:13Cool. And then that
leaves us room for BGVs
on 7.

00:05:22So that's nice, we have
everything at our control,
and of course,
the lead vocal as 8.

00:05:26So, we are able to group everything.

00:05:29And then, the next thing I do
is just kind of put everything at zero.

00:05:34Push everything up here.

00:05:41That's a good starting point for Vance
to take over here.

00:05:45Anything else I normally would do
would be to import
plug-ins from previous sessions,
things like that.

00:05:53But because we've just tracked this
and switched over to mix mode,
all the plug-ins that he's been using
are the ones that we're gonna start with.

00:06:00I think that's pretty much
where I would hand this off to Vance.

00:06:03Once this is up and Mike has got it
sort of where it all plays back,
one of the other things that
I'm gonna do here real quick
is I am gonna align my parallel buses.

00:21:43Anything I do major,
I'll sort of stop and take a break,
but basically it's just touching up
some of the tones
and things at this point
so that they're trying
to speak to me a little bit.

00:23:03I've assigned a few things
to the buses here,
the guitars.

00:23:06What I'm doing is I'm just
listening to these guitars,
trying to get Tyler's guitar
a little bit brighter,
not quite so thick.

00:23:15And then I'm doing
with Graham's guitar
not so much of brightness,
but just a little bit different
spectral balance.

00:23:21Again, I want these guitars
to sort of fit together like this.

00:23:24Basically what I did is I added
a little bit of EQ.

00:23:27And why don't I just explain
what EQ I was...

00:23:29I'm gonna have to look over here.

00:23:31I started flat
because I didn't flatten
the entire desk for my 0.

00:23:35I actually don't like that.

00:23:37I kind of like, just sometimes,
the serendipity of whatever it was
for the last mix we did.

00:23:42"Let's see if that makes it sound cool!"
But we are sort of starting
somewhat from zero,
so, the EQs are relatively flat.

00:23:49I turned them on, and here's
basically the changes I made:
I did 3 dB
at 3 k on one track.

00:24:006 dB at 3 k
on the second track
for Tyler Bryant's guitar.

00:24:04So let's take a listen
at what that difference was.

00:24:08Here's flat.

00:24:15Better. Okay, now,
on Graham's guitar...

00:24:20So here's flat.

00:24:31So the change, the difference was,
on Graham's I have 2 dB at 4.5 k.

00:24:38And I have 6 dB of...

00:24:41Well, 3.5 or so.
Somewhere in there.

00:24:45About 4 dB of,
strangely,
1.5 k in a big, huge shelf.

00:24:51So I'm just boosting that whole thing
on one channel, one channel only.

00:24:55The second channel of Graham's guitar.

00:24:58So, those two things made these guitars
fit a little bit better to me.

00:25:03Just sonically, in the mix.

00:25:11What I wanna do now
is I wanna listen to
the Richard Dodd box,
the Motone,
and see what it does.

00:25:17And then I wanna listen
to the Cooper Time Cube,
so, I'm just gonna play
these tracks and take a listen.

00:26:13Okay. So, this is with
the Cooper Time Cube out.

00:26:19And this is with
the Cooper Time Cube in.

00:26:33Full disclosure: I have a setting.

00:26:35I know pretty much
where those need to be.

00:26:38So, I always know
where they sound better.

00:26:40On the Cooper Time Cube
there is no setting,
the only setting
is Input and Output.

00:26:46There's no time settings or anything
because it is a garden hose.

00:26:49UA has a fantastic
Cooper Time Cube plug-in
that has a lot of settings,
but that doesn't exist
in the real world.

00:26:57It's about something around 13
and something around
17 milliseconds,
left and right.

00:27:04And it's just really nice,
it spreads the mix out
and it provides some cool
harmonic character.

00:27:09Kind of some nice, odd, weird,
distorted harmonics.

00:27:12I kind of really like it.

00:27:14I'm gonna add a couple of things here.

00:27:17I always have on the kick and snare,
I always use the Distressors.

00:27:22Now, when we were tracking,
I didn't use any direct compression.

00:27:26I just used a little bit of the Distressor
and the Transient Designer in parallel.

00:27:30So drums actually sound good,
and they've got good sustain.

00:27:34But I kind of want a little bit
more control over them,
so I'm gonna work on those a little bit
and there may be just a little bit of EQ,
but not much.

00:27:43So, I have a chain
that Mike has patched,
that is basically on Channel 3.

00:27:48The Insert/Send goes to
an Empirical Labs Distressor,
and then that Distressor
goes to an API 550b.

00:27:57The same thing is for the snare,
so Channel 4 goes over
to the Distressor
- they're labeled Kick and Snare -
and then over to the 550b.

00:28:04What I'm gonna do is I'm just
gonna listen to these two now,
add or not a little bit
of compression,
maybe add a little bit of EQ,
to just get the snare
to sort of fill out
a little bit in the mix.

00:28:42So what I'm doing right now
is I'm just putting...

00:28:45I'm not listening to this compression,
but I have an idea that this is about
the right amount I'm gonna want.

00:28:51I don't know what the level is,
I don't know any of that yet.

00:28:54I'm gonna now insert these
on the kick drum first.

00:29:13And now on the snare.

00:29:22By adding the Distressor
you can kind of see now
that the snare kind of starts to
lay back in the mix a little bit.

00:29:33Now I'm gonna turn the Distressor
on and back off, so you can hear it.

00:30:17Let me talk a little bit
about the kick drum,
the kick and snare
on the Distressors.

00:30:22My starting point for the kick drum:
the Attack is at 10,
the Release is at 0.

00:30:27Usually, my input from my console,
somewhere between 5 and 6
is the Input settings,
and Output is somewhere
between 5 and 6.

00:30:354:1, and I have Distortion 2.

00:30:38I like the even harmonics on the drums.

00:30:41Snare drum is a little bit different.

00:30:43Input somewhere between 5 and 6,
Attack is somewhere between 5 and 6,
Release is somewhere between 4 and 5,
and Output somewhere between 5 and 7.

00:30:55Alright? Because I compress it
a little harder.

00:30:58Again, same thing, 4:1.

00:31:00Rarely do these settings change.

00:31:04Ratio-wise, I really like 4:1
in the Distressor.

00:31:07I added
2 dB of 10 k
to the snare.

00:31:14And I added
2 dB of 3 k
to the kick drum.

00:31:20And 2 dB of 10 k
to the kick.

00:31:24I took 2 dB away of 180
out of the kick drum.

00:31:29I'm gonna apply a couple
of parallel buses here to the drums.

00:31:33I have a couple of rules about
drums and parallel buses.

00:31:37The 33609 sounds really great
kind of on everything,
so I'm gonna apply the kick drum,
I'm gonna apply the snare drum,
both toms, and the overheads.

00:31:47I'm not gonna do the 33609s
on the room mic,
I'm not gonna do it on the front mic,
I'm not gonna do it on the Taste mic,
or the mono.

00:31:55The mono bus is just the mono bus,
we'll get to that here in a minute.

00:31:59It just is what it is, it's done,
it's baked, it's done.

00:32:02So give me one second here.

00:32:21My gain structure is set up
- because I've been
kind of doing this a while -
so that...
What I want is,
I want the 33609 to do about
4 dB of compression.

00:32:32And I believe, at the moment,
that's what it's doing.

00:32:34So, I'm gonna take a look here,
I'm gonna hit Play,
and we're gonna see if that is
in fact what it's doing.

00:32:47And that's exactly what
it's doing, about 4 dB.

00:32:49So, now let me put that into the mix
and see what we get.

00:33:05The cool thing about the Neve
is it sort of sharpens
all the attack a little bit.

00:33:09I don't know how it does it,
but it does it.

00:33:12The settings on the 33609 are:
Threshold at 0,
Recovery at 100 milliseconds,
Gain at 0,
and 3:1.

00:33:21The limiter side I actually have on,
I think I have the Threshold
all the way up
and the Recovery time at 100.

00:33:28So I think that's at +14,
I think that's where the Threshold is.

00:33:31The UAD version of this
reacts exactly the same.

00:33:36It's fantastic.

00:33:37So, that's the setting.

00:33:39Strangely,
the setting for the guitars
on the 33609 is identical.

00:33:43We'll get to that in a minute.

00:33:45So, let's talk about the Fatso.

00:33:47This is my Drum Crush bus.

00:33:50The Drum Crush bus
came about on accident.

00:33:54It came about when I was
mixing in-the-box.

00:33:57I had my Fatso
on my stereo mix bus.

00:34:01I was cycling through the settings
so that...

00:34:05It was just...
Some drums were playing,
just a drum track was playing,
I just had it going,
just some drums.

00:34:11That was it, I just had
the drums up in my mix.

00:34:13And I was cycling through
to get back to the...

00:34:17basically, the Buss
compressor setting,
and I hit the Spank,
and somehow something happened
and I just thought,
"Wow, that is awesome!
Whatever is happening there,
it's awesome!"
So, then I tried to figure out,
"Okay, now, how do I
get this in my mix?"
So I printed it
and then slid it around
and got it.

00:34:38You know, it was a complete
pain in the ass,
and then UAD, UA,
sort of solved that for me
by coming up with the UAD Fatso.

00:34:46So, I'm gonna send on this mix
just the kick, just the snare.

00:34:51That's it!
Sometimes I do the toms,
but this time I'm not gonna
do the toms on this.

00:34:57I think they're fine as they are.

00:34:59So just the kick, just the snare,
to the Drum Crush bus.

00:35:02So let me turn these on for it.

00:35:05These are in Buses 3 and 4.

00:35:09Alright.

00:35:10I'm gonna cut the rest of the band here.

00:35:15And we'll just listen to just the drums.

00:35:19From...

00:35:21...the downbeat.

00:35:30Okay, cool.

00:35:32Let's AFL,
put the console on AFL,
and let's listen to just the 33609.

00:35:51So that's just the 33609.

00:35:53Now, just the Fatso.

00:36:06Notice how long everything is,
how fat and...

00:36:10you know, screwed up it is.

00:36:15Alright, cool.

00:36:16Also, notice there's a bunch
of cymbals and things like that,
that's why I don't put the overheads
or tom mics that have leakage
or the room mics
or any of that stuff in it.

00:36:25At this point I haven't moved
any faders on the desk.

00:36:29This is all just at zero,
everything's sitting at zero.

00:36:32The pans are correct on the console,
everything is just at zero.

00:36:35So I'm just basically
laying the foundation
of what I want the mix to be here.

00:36:40So now let me put
the regular drums in,
I'll take it out of AFL.

00:36:46I'm gonna play the first
part of the verse
just without the
parallel compression,
and then I'm gonna
play it again with the 33609,
and then I'm gonna play it
with the Fatso added on.

00:36:59Because these are an additive thing,
so, here's first just the drums
minus the 33609
or the Fatso.

00:38:02Alright, so, now you start to feel
that lengthening on the snare,
the depth.

00:38:08The key to the parallel buses
is you want to have the transient.

00:38:12So, you know,
the transients are over here
on this side of the desk,
totally clean.

00:38:16Over here, I can add those in
and take them away as needed
to fit the amount
of punch in the track.

00:38:24But I do want that
sort of fat, thick thing.

00:38:28So now,
here's one more piece of it.

00:38:32This is the Acme Opticom.

00:38:35I don't know the total story,
but I think that Alan Sutton,
who is the designer,
I think they had an LA-2A
that he broke,
and when they broke the LA-2A,
by taking some parts out of it,
it created the Opticom on accident.

00:38:52I don't know that
that's a true story,
but I would like to think of it
as being a true story.

00:38:56So, it's true until somebody
tells me it's not.

00:38:59So, I'm gonna add that in.

00:39:01Again, just the kick and snare
to the Opticom here.

00:39:06That is on Bus 12.

00:39:14Alright, so just kick and snare
on the Opticom.

00:39:17So, I'm gonna solo this
in AFL
and listen to it a little bit
before I blend it into the mix.

00:39:26I think you're gonna get what it does.

00:39:52Okay, so, I'm gonna
bypass the Opticom.

00:39:54I'll just bypass
the compression circuit here
so you can hear what it's doing.

00:44:25Anybody who is interested
should just look up
the Bedini Audio Spatial Expander
and look up the creator of it.

00:44:33You know,
it's just a weird little box,
it has a couple knobs on it.

00:44:37I never turn them,
I never move them,
I never do anything with them,
but use it in mixes.

00:44:44So, what I'm gonna do is
I want you to hear the Bedini.

00:44:48I'm gonna turn it off and on.

00:44:50It comes back in one of my
effects returns on the desk,
which just comes straight
into the stereo bus.

00:44:55They're up here in the middle
of the console,
and I'm just gonna
turn it off and turn it on
and let you hear it.

00:45:01You have to be really careful with it
because it's really fun to use.

00:45:05It really can make guitars like...

00:45:07like way out in space on the left
and way out in space on the right.

00:45:10Of course, then you mono it
and they're completely gone.

00:45:14What I'm trying to say is it
makes for really fun mixes
until the artist approves your mix
or listens to your mix
on their iPhone, in mono,
and can't figure out why,
you know, the guitars are missing,
or the solo is missing, or something.

00:45:27So, I'm gonna add that in now.

00:45:29That's on Bus 21 and 22 on the desk.

00:45:3521 and 22.

00:45:37So let's see if this is all working.

00:46:05Here's with it out.

00:46:34I'm gonna use this box
from time to time
on certain things
just to create some space.

00:46:41Instruments that don't appear
for long periods of time,
really cool to use it.

00:02:25I don't need any compression on these,
I don't feel like I need to put any
individual compression on them.

00:02:31There's also a high harmony here,
at the back.

00:02:39Okay, I'm gonna listen to that
and see if I feel like that needs
to be balanced differently
when we get down the line,
but that's basically me kind of
just saying, "Okay, cool."
Alright, now let's talk
about the lead vocal.

00:02:52A few years ago
I...

00:02:58Like I said, I used to have a Fatso.

00:02:59I did a lot of mixing in-the-box.

00:03:02There's nothing wrong
with mixing in-the-box,
it just doesn't work for me
in the way that I like to work.

00:03:08But I did try it, I had...

00:03:09I didn't try it. I had to do it,
I had no choice.

00:03:13But what happened to me was,
I mixed in-the-box and then I started
using a summing box,
a Dangerous summing box.

00:03:21And what happened is one day
I accidentally patched...

00:03:25I had one of my 1176s patched.

00:03:28Because of the Dangerous,
you can do it in mono or stereo.

00:03:32I was using a stereo return
for my vocals,
and I actually patched
something wrong.

00:03:37I patched the Fatso on one side
and I patched the 1176 on the other.

00:03:42After immediately hearing
what the vocal...

00:03:45what was happening with the Fatso,
I thought, "How? How can I use this?"
So I put the Dangerous in mono
and combined them.

00:03:54And something about the 1176
doing what it does,
and something about the Fatso
doing what it does
worked so well that I just started
sort of working on this a little more.

00:04:07And about the time
it really came together
was when UA came out
with the Fatso plug-in,
and the 1176,
the 2nd generation 1176.

00:04:19So, now, every record I mix
that comes out of
Pro Tools, I do this.

00:04:24If I'm mixing something out of tape,
I just patch this up with hardware,
I use the Fatso.

00:04:29I ignore the Drum Crush bus,
I use it for vocals.

00:04:33So, let me show you my patch here.

00:04:35Again, this track is a stereo track.

00:04:38It was a stereo track purely because
I wanted to be able to process these,
edit these easily in stereo.

00:04:45And Mike has dumped them
into my session,
they're in my session as a stereo track
but they're going to one bus.

00:05:07Now, I'm gonna take the stereo track,
I'm gonna hide it and make inactive.

00:05:11These two tracks
now both go to Bus 32,
and I'm gonna relabel
these tracks slightly.

00:05:18So this is 'Comp...

00:05:21...Clean.'
And this is gonna be 'Comp...

00:05:25...Distort.'
I'm gonna move them slightly
so they work better
in my sort of frame of reference.

00:05:32The Clean one is gonna be here,
this is gonna be the Distorted one.

00:05:36I'm gonna slightly
change the color of...

00:05:38Oh, no. Sorry.

00:05:43There we go.

00:05:45This is gonna be the Distorted one here.

00:05:47I'm gonna solo this up.

00:05:53And this will be the Clean.

00:05:59Now I can adjust this level,
I can adjust this balance
the way I want it.

00:06:04I want to explain
the Fatso and the 1176,
which are these two tracks here.

00:06:09The Lead Vocal Crush track
and the Lead Vocal Clean.

00:06:13Here is the Fatso,
and here is the 1176.

00:06:17Now, what I'm gonna do here is
I want these two boxes
to do a certain thing.

00:06:25The 1176 is gonna do
Rock 'n' Roll clean.

00:06:291176, this is the Blue Stripe,
I kind of like it,
I like the extra distortion,
the harmonic characteristics of it.

00:06:36And most of the time
I will run it in this mode,
the 4:1 mode.

00:06:40Every now and then I'll do
a multi-button thing,
but normally in this mode I...

00:06:44Because I've got that, so,
let me just point
each one of these out.

00:06:49This will be the vocal playing back
into the 1176.

00:06:53And you can kind of see the settings.

00:06:55There is an actual preset
in UAD called...

00:06:59You go to Vance Powell and it says
'Start Here for Vocals.'
That is this setting,
it's exactly this patch.

00:07:05I'm gonna play a little bit
of the vocal back
and you can kind of see how much
compression we are doing.

00:07:10And then I'm gonna slightly
adjust this level,
going into it,
to get the amount
of compression I want.

00:07:30Okay, let's high-pass it.

00:07:41I want that compression
to live on this 1176
somewhere between
5 to 10 dB of compression.

00:07:49I know that sounds like a lot,
but this is a Rock 'n' Roll track.

00:07:53It's gonna have to do that.

00:07:54Now, let's talk about the Crush.

00:07:57The Crush is different.

00:07:59The same track,
this is just the clean track,
is gonna drive both of these signals.

00:08:03I sort of have a joke
about the Crush, and that is:
I want every light
that the Fatso has, on.

00:08:15So I'm actually gonna turn it up.

00:08:25So you can kind of see here
we're doing somewhere between
10 and 20 dB of compression.

00:08:36What I wanna do here
is I'm gonna blend these two together
by using the meters on my desk.

00:08:43You can do this in Pro Tools,
it's no big deal.

00:08:46We're gonna actually look at it
on Pro Tools too,
and blend them by setting
the output levels
of the plug-in.

00:08:53I think right now the output level
will probably be a little loud
for the Fatso.

00:08:57And I'm just gonna
kind of send the same signal
so we can get just the Clean now,
not this Distorted track.

00:09:02We'll get to that in a minute.

00:09:04And blend the two together,
so I have to turn these on.

00:09:07I'm gonna turn this down a little bit.

00:09:23Okay, so, what ends up
happening here
is that
one channel,
one side, the clean side,
is gonna have a little bit
more top end,
it's gonna be a little...

00:09:35A little cleaner, seriously,
than the Fatso side.

00:09:38But as the vocal,
as he starts to fall off,
the Fatso's gain starts...

00:09:44That gain reduction
starts opening
and it fills the back end
of the vocal,
so it fills up what's going on.

00:09:52Now, what ends up
happening too is,
often I will have to sever
the vocal in solo,
use Clip Gain
to get rid of in-breaths,
to get rid of 'esses,'
to get rid of 'ts.'
The great thing about Clip Gain
is it's doing it all
before the compressor,
not after the compressor.

00:10:09So, all those little weird
'esses' and 'ts'
that the compressor
really crunches up,
and makes the 'esses'
really ugly and all that,
you can kind of get rid of it.

00:10:18You can make it so that vocal
just parks in your mix,
and I'm literally probably
riding the vocal
1 and 2 dB steps here.

00:10:26This is not a jazz record
or whatever,
this is a Rock 'n' Roll track.

00:10:30That vocal has to just park
in the middle and be powerful,
and, you know,
that's what I do.

00:10:36So,
now let's just listen here quickly
to the distortion track.

00:10:41This distortion track
is going to cause us
a few more issues,
so I'm gonna just play
the track here
and add the distortion in
until I get the amount I want.

00:11:12I like this a lot for the
Clean vocal track
just to add a little bit of sparkle
to this particular track.

00:11:43That's kind of that for now.

00:11:45This is a basic thing for showing this.

00:11:48Now, what I will do here
is I will group these two together.

00:11:51There is a group called
LD Vocal here,
and I will set my faders
up here at zero,
I'll set this somewhere near zero,
and I'll play back the track here
and then adjust these two levels
so that they hit the desk
at the level that I want them to.

00:12:40I'm now at this point where
I've kind of figured out a few things,
I got a few things going on.

00:12:45I've got the desk, you know,
with a zero fader balance.

00:12:48No EQ on anything
but a couple of guitars.

00:12:50A little bit on the kick and snare.

00:12:52I have to do a little bit of computer...

00:12:54SSL nerdery.

00:12:55What I do is I go into Pro Tools
and I create a marker.

00:12:59That's the 'SSL Start' marker.

00:13:01I hit Play, the SSL runs,
I see a start time over here
that corresponds with my marker.

00:13:082 hours, 19 minutes, 10 seconds.

00:13:10Once I do that,
then I go to the SSL,
I hit Name-Title.

00:13:14A F T E R S H O C K.

00:13:18That's the name of the song.

00:13:20I hit that,
and now we have a start time
and we have a song
on the floppy disk.

00:13:30I know, it's floppy disk.

00:13:31So now that's on the floppy,
that's great.

00:13:34That allows me to...

00:13:35when we get ready
to run automation,
to have a start point.
Perfect.

00:13:39So, anytime you record
a bass guitar,
a DI and an amp,
they're never in time.

00:13:46So,
this is something I skipped earlier
and I need to not skip it.

00:14:00I fooled around with it
a little bit yesterday,
and basically
I just solo the bass
and sit in the middle
of my speakers,
like now.

00:14:08Sometimes I put it in mono,
sometimes I don't.

00:14:11I'm not gonna do it today, but,
I'll solo the bass,
find the spot where
the bass is playing.

00:14:16So we're gonna go
to the verse here.

00:14:22And then I'm gonna
adjust the time
so that I make the bass
as shitty-sounding as possible.

00:14:30In other words, no bass,
and then I'm gonna flip the phase.

00:14:33It's always the DI,
so your DI happens then
and your amp is a little behind it.

00:14:37I'm gonna slide the DI,
basically, back in time,
to match it.

00:14:55It's pretty shitty-sounding
right there.

00:14:57Now I'm gonna flip the phase.
Check out what happens.

00:15:12Yeah!
That's right.

00:15:15So, this is a starting point
for the bass.

00:15:18So now let's go back
to what we were doing there,
I'm just gonna come in
where the guitar comes in.

00:23:01I'm starting to get a feel
for where the song is starting to land,
the 2-Bus,
starting to figure out where it's starting
to land with the bus compressor.

00:23:10I added the Maag EQ,
just a little bit of the Air band
to raise the top.

00:23:152 dB, just a little bit.

00:23:1720 k, no other EQ,
just kind of...

00:23:20scoop up the top a little bit.

00:23:22I've added a couple
of compressors
to a background vocal,
to the 'aftershock'
sort of hit with Tyler, for Noah.

00:23:30Put an 1176 on that,
but I haven't done
anything else.

00:23:35A little bit of reverb
and a Tape Echo,
just a little bit.
Same Tape Echoes.

00:23:40A little bit of the Master Room
on the background vocal,
and then I sent the solo
to my Chandler EMI bus
to just sort of push the solo forward
in that sort of very limited
kind of like brick...

00:23:54Just, you know, like,
I want more level of that.

00:23:57Alright, so a couple
other things I did here.

00:23:59I listened to the room mic a little bit
and I did just a little tiny bit of EQ.

00:24:05A couple dB in the low-mid,
like 2 to 3 dB
at 300 cycles.

00:24:12Just a little low-mid.

00:24:14And then I hit the...

00:24:17...compressors on the console.

00:24:20And those are actually set...

00:24:22They're in full-limit.

00:24:24They're in infinite limit.

00:24:26The reason why I turned
the limiter on
on that room
is that instead of just
raising the fader,
what I really want is I wanna
push all the transients down.

00:24:36I want it to pump,
I want it to sort of
do that thing, you know,
that it's kind of doing here
when I hit Play here.

00:24:52And, you know, most people
would say, "Oh, drum room."
No, this is a room room.

00:24:56This is the room,
this has got guitars,
it's got all that in it.

00:24:59So I want some of that ambience,
but really what I want is I want it all
to sort of level out a bit
and just become kind of a body of...

00:25:07A smeary body in the track.

00:25:11Most people would want
the inverse of that,
they want it really clean
and clear, but,
I kind of want it all messy and,
you know, weird-sounding.

00:25:18So, it's only doing
a couple dB of limiting.

00:25:20At least that's what the LED says,
so, yeah.

00:25:24It felt good. This is...

00:25:26...a real common thing
that I do on room mics.

00:25:28When they come to me,
I just hit that button.

00:25:30I did a little bit
of de-essing on the vocal
using the FabFilter.

00:25:35Hitting the FabFilter de-esser.

00:25:37And I really like this plug-in,
I really, really like the way it sounds
and it's just a little bit of de-essing
on both tracks for Tyler.

00:25:45And then I think I might maybe
do a little de-essing on Noah,
but, I'm not sure yet.

00:25:51So, I'm gonna keep working here.

00:28:57So here's one more little thing I did.

00:29:01I have an Eventide H3000,
and on the BGVs,
on these background vocals,
they're on a bus.

00:29:09It's Bus 17-18.

00:29:11The patch on the H3000
is on every H3000.

00:29:14It's 101, it's Layered Shift.

00:29:17I load the patch
and then I turn the screen off.

00:29:21I make it so that you
can't change the patch
unless you know what button to hit
and I turn the screen off.

00:29:27So, it's down here,
I just hit this button
and turn the screen off, like that.

00:29:32You can't see it.
It's on.

00:29:33There's nothing to recall,
you just load 101, Layered Shift.

00:29:37And it sounds really cool,
it's a really cool sound.

00:29:40Something like this.

00:29:47Alright.

00:29:48There is a plug-in
version of it, sort of.

00:29:52Eventide has a bunch of different
things that would do it,
Band Delays, a few other things
would do it, maybe,
but basically,
the Soundtoys MicroShift.

00:30:00That is that sound.

00:30:02That's exactly what it is.

00:30:03Now, how does it play into this?
Well, it sounds like this if we solo it.

00:30:13Okay, cool.

00:30:15So, I'm gonna mute it.

00:30:17Here's muted.

00:30:29That's the H3000,
it's on these BGVs.

00:30:45The next thing is,
there is a background vocal group here
that has Noah's four vocals in it.

00:30:51I'm gonna add a little bit
of compression to that.

00:30:55We're gonna solo these up here again
and listen to them in solo,
and just see what the
compressor is doing here.

00:31:38Now that I've set that,
I'm gonna change the compressor.

00:31:41I'll go with something a little slower,
a little...

00:31:45...softer, a little more leveler-like.

00:31:48I'm kind of using this guy
and I kind of like it.

00:31:52And I put it in Fast and Slow.

00:31:55Kind of backwards.

00:32:45On this background vocal group,
why would I use this plug-in
for a background vocal group
instead of using the SSL compressors?
I like the SSL compressors
for certain things;
for certain things
they're really great.

00:32:59I'm not a big fan of them on vocals.

00:33:01And they're not bad
on lead vocals, actually.

00:33:03On a Rock 'n' Roll lead vocal like this,
they're not bad at all.

00:33:06But, for background vocals
I kind of wanted something
that was gonna attack really fast.

00:33:10Therefore, make the vocal
really smooth
in the way it fits behind Tyler's part,
and then releases kind of slow.

00:33:18So, it's going to stretch out that gain,
that whole thing just sort of...

00:33:23I don't know how to describe it.

00:33:25It becomes a bubble of sound
that just fits in behind him
and doesn't pop.

00:33:29I don't really want them
to pop in this thing.

00:33:32I want his vocal to sort of pop,
but I don't really want
the big background vocals.

00:33:36So, that would be the reason for that.

00:33:39Let me keep rocking here.

00:33:41Gotta get up and hear
how this solo part works.

00:35:26SPL levels are important.

00:35:28I track pretty darn loud
because a lot of times these bands...

00:35:32Their audience is gonna listen loud.

00:35:34When I'm starting the mix,
these first sort of 20,
30 minutes or so of mix,
I'm mixing pretty loud.

00:35:41I'm gonna tell you exactly,
but I say 'exactly' based upon
my incredibly shitty
SPL meter in my phone.

00:35:48Alright?
Okay. C-Weighted,
slow response, 100 dB.

00:36:06Alright?
Now, that's not normally
where I do most of the real work.

00:36:13Most of the real work actually lives
- strangely - on my desk,
right here.

00:36:21I have a little red dot on my Avocet.

00:36:24This is where the normal level is.

00:36:27About 100 dB would be my normal thing.

00:36:29This actually is where I normally mix...

00:36:33...for a while.

00:36:35Three levels: the upper level,
this mid level, and then a lower level.

00:36:40This will be on my ProAcs Studio 100s,
it's what I'm mixing on now.

00:36:44But, most of the detailed level setting
is gonna be on my NS-10s.

00:36:50And what I do is I listen loud,
rock out for a bit,
kind of get the balance,
get a rough balance.

00:36:56That's what I have here now,
it's a rough balance.

00:36:59If I play the track
I hear every part of the track,
everything.

00:37:02That doesn't mean it's a mix,
it just means it's a balance.

00:37:05Then, I usually go and get a coffee.

00:37:08I walk around, I get water,
I go to the bathroom, I do whatever.

00:37:11I get away for a few minutes
and let my ears sort of *sound*
turn back down a little bit.

00:37:18Then I come in here,
I hit the NS-10s,
I put them on this mark,
this little mark that I have
that was basically the 89 dB mark,
and I hit Play.

00:37:31And now we are talking 86, 87.

00:37:34Right? Less...

00:37:35you know, obviously,
less low end on the ProAcs,
and...

00:37:39You know, a completely different sound.

00:37:42They are the inverse of each other,
they're in...

00:37:45One of them is concave
and one of them is convex.

00:37:48One of them pushes
all the midrange out,
the other one takes all the midrange out,
puts all the low end and top end in.

00:37:54And, so, it's sort of like that...

00:37:56Almost like the Auratone vibe,
like, "Let me see how bad
I can make these speakers sound
compared to the good one."
And what happens is,
after a time,
I just mix a little bit,
they sound totally
perfect and normal,
and I get totally used to them.

00:38:12And, you know,
I have been mixing on these
literally since some time
in the '80s or '90s.

00:38:17Early '90s, really.

00:38:18So, when it comes to speakers,
know what you have and use them,
but get used to them,
get used to what they are.

00:38:24The very last thing is that
that 95 or 85 dB...

00:38:2985 to 90 dB level,
I have one below that.

00:38:33And that one below it
is this one.

00:38:4973 dB.

00:38:52So, 73 dB, C-Weighted,
slow response.

00:38:56That's pretty damn quiet.

00:38:58I will mix the vast majority
of this track at that level.

00:39:04I'll do all the vocal rides at that level,
I'll do solo rides at that level,
I'll do most of the mixing at that level.

00:39:13I'll do EQ
and tones and ideas and thoughts
at the upper level,
the way-upper level,
the 100 dB level.

00:39:23I'll do gross EQ at the medium level
on the ProAcs.

00:39:28Then I'll drop down to the NS-10s,
listen to them for a little bit
at that medium level,
which is pretty loud for NS-10s,
and then, down here to seventy...

00:39:3773 to 77 dB.

00:39:40That's kind of my range.

00:39:42The mix coming out of the speakers
is way, way quieter than my voice.

00:39:47My voice is at about eighty...

00:39:4989, 80...

00:39:51I mean, 80 dB,
something like that.

00:39:53So, we're gonna listen here
now from the top
because there is this sort of
long, weird intro
and I wanna make sure
I get that placed correctly
in the stereo mix.

00:40:03It's a big, long fade-up,
so, that's gonna happen now.

00:40:37As I run through these passes,
you'll see me sort of doing automation,
moving things a little bit.

00:40:44And basically what I'm doing is I'm...

00:40:47I'm auditioning my moves.

00:40:51I'm auditioning my moves for the mix.

00:40:53So, one of the things is I know
I have this delay down here.

00:40:58It's a loop - it's the Beardverb,
the Polysat -
that is gonna land
in the verses on Tyler's vocal.

00:41:04So, I know that's gonna happen.

00:41:06So, I'm gonna...

00:41:08As this goes down, you're gonna see me
turn that off and turn it on.

00:41:11I'm gonna turn it on in the verses,
I'm gonna turn it off in the choruses.

00:41:15And then, I may come up with...

00:41:20...another delay,
another effects throw
for the chorus.

00:41:26And I'll do that with the other loop,
so, we'll do that here in a second too.

00:41:30So...

00:41:53Okay, cool.

00:41:54So this little intro guitar
is totally dry.

00:41:57So, I'm gonna add just a little bit
of the Master Room spring reverb to it
because I think it would be cool with it.

00:42:59I added just a little bit
of the Fulltone Tape Echoes to that.

00:43:03Earlier...

00:43:05I didn't tell you this,
but I took the Fulltones
and I sent them into the plate.

00:43:11It's kind of a cool sound,
you can definitely hear it in this
when I solo this guitar,
when I add it in.

00:43:17So here's with it:
So, that's just really the Fulltones
driving the plate reverb a bit.

00:43:31So now, it's sort of putting
that solo part in the room.

00:43:34It's actually putting it kind of
in the same room that Tyler is in,
which is kind of the...

00:43:38They're all playing
sort of in the same room, right?
So, that's kind of the idea.

00:43:53One more thing.

00:43:54This intro guitar
is in the solo VCA grouper.

00:44:00So we have Tyler's, Graham's,
these are his rhythms.

00:44:03This number 5, it says Guitars,
this is the chorus guitar,
and then the turnaround guitar, so,
that's really what these are.

00:44:12I'm just gonna put
'Ch Guitars' there.

00:44:15Of course, guitars.
That's all I need to know.

00:44:18And then the solo guitar
down here is in 6
along with this intro guitar,
these two are in the same set of pairs.

00:44:25I added a little bit of EQ to the bass,
I brought up on the DI...

00:44:30I did...

00:44:33...2 or 3 dB at let's say...

00:44:36let's guess about 60 or so.

00:44:39On the distortion side
I added a little bit of 1 k.

00:44:42And a little trick that I'll
be happy to point out.

00:44:45It works for me,
and that is that
bass guitar isn't in the low end.

00:44:51It's not about the low end.

00:44:53It's about everything from about...

00:44:55...675 to about 1.5 k.

00:44:59That's where all the bass lives
because that's the upper fundamental.

00:45:03That's all the string noise, all that.

00:45:05So, often times when I'm recording bass,
I will use a...

00:45:12I probably did that on the tracking here,
I probably used a bunch of midrange
on the console
to sort of pull up all that,
but especially distortion bass.

00:45:22So, let me show you the difference
on the distortion bass here.

00:46:00When I cut the track,
I had the Sta-Level on the bass DI
but nothing on the amp,
because the amp...

00:46:09I just like the amp being kind of free
and no compression.

00:46:12And I have nothing on the track
other than the IBP
that's setting the phase.

00:46:16So,
I kind of like how it is,
I like how it's sort of free and rangey,
but it could use
a little bit of compression.

00:46:24So, I have a parallel bus set up for this,
just for this very fact,
and that's Bus 11.

00:46:31So I'm gonna send both the DI
and the amp to 11.

00:46:36And that 11 is gonna go today
to the Sta-Level.

00:46:41That's what we have patched up today.

00:46:46It's gonna do a fair
amount of compression,
about 15 dB of compression.

00:47:07Here's without it:
Listening at 72 dB there.

00:47:28So, a few things I'm noticing.

00:47:30One, that in the verses
I'm not driving my bus
compressor very hard.

00:47:35I'm getting a lot of
Left-Right VU movement,
which is all fine.

00:47:40That's really good, I like that.

00:47:42But let's see if I can add
just a little bit more
bus compressor on it, alright?
Right now we're at about
2 dB of compression,
and I'm gonna see...

00:47:53Oh, actually, I take that back.
1 dB of compression.

00:47:56I'll see if I can get a little bit more
with a little less VU swing.

00:48:19That feels pretty good
and looks good.

00:48:21I know it sounds dumb
to say it looks good,
but, you know,
I've been looking
at VU meters my whole life
and I can usually tell
that as long as those
meters stay within,
you know, the 3 to +1, +2,
somewhere in there
while the mix is happening,
the mix is gonna be happening,
it's gonna be rocking.

00:48:39So, you don't want it to be, you know,
coming way down to -10
and then going way up to +2
every kick drum hit.
Something is wrong there.

00:48:48You want that to sort of live,
you want that mix
to sort of glue together,
and the way to glue it together
isn't by adding more compression,
it's by making sure
that everything is in the mix
at the right level
it's supposed to be at.

00:00:33I'm gonna change a patch real quick.

00:00:44I moved a patch here.

00:00:51There we go.

00:01:03Alright, cool.

00:01:04So I kind of like this sort of
long echo thing in the verse
to kind of give it a little bit
of tension and stuff on the vocal.

00:01:10This is gonna happen in the verse.

00:01:33So that's gonna be
happening in the verses.

00:05:17Alright. So, what I'm doing here is
I'm kind of coming up
with a little bit of an additional effect
for Tyler, for the verse,
and an additional effect for the chorus.

00:05:29So, one of them is...

00:05:32...a pedal into my analog delay.

00:05:36It's just very bandwidth-limited
in one particular frequency,
kind of an annoying nasally thing.

00:05:43It's this long sort of thing
that happens right here.

00:05:52'Enough... enough...'
That kind of vibe.

00:05:54And then the other one
is in the chorus,
it is a short, slightly distorted
frequency thing
to just make the chorus
do something different.

00:06:14And I'm actually gonna tie
Noah's vocal into that.

00:06:18So, Noah's vocal,
and that's gonna get sent here
to my pedal loops.

00:06:22A little bit less than Tyler's.

00:06:46So remember also
down underneath there
is this crazy 'aftershock' thing
that we did with Graham Whitford.

00:06:53It's this thing:
Alright, so that's kind of going on
down underneath there, in there.

00:07:01It's in the B.A.S.E. box,
so it's really super wide,
and, you know, it's kind of
just underneath it.

00:07:57I can hear the bass,
I can hear the bass
when it kind of goes up high
and kind of does
its little solo-y thing.

00:08:02Cool.

00:08:03We'll listen to the solo
here real quick,
make sure that that fit,
and that it's at the right level,
then make sure the little solos
at the end work.

00:08:10And then I'm gonna
just go to the end
and see how we're gonna
end the track;
whether I'm gonna end
and do an auto-fade,
I can pull a fade down really fast,
or I'm gonna do something really short
or something like that.

00:08:20So we're gonna listen to that now.

00:09:14Now, did you see the tracking video?
I cut all of these guitars with the echo
and the reverb and all that stuff on it,
so, there's really nothing
for me to add here.

00:09:24A little, the tiniest bit
- I don't even know
that you'll probably ever hear it -
of the Master Room reverb in there.

00:09:31That's just me sort of thinking
that I'm the only one
who's ever gonna hear it,
and that I know it's on there.

00:09:36It's the ghost-y something
that I put on there.

00:09:41You know, I don't even know
if you'll hear it.

00:09:43But, I like that I put it on there.

00:09:46Does that make sense?
Feel free to do that whenever you want.

00:10:47Cool. So there's a big
sort of echo-y thing
at the end with Tyler's guitar.

00:10:53What if that wasn't there?
Let's hear what that's like.

00:10:58He'll want it there,
but what if it wasn't?
Like that.

00:11:15I like that better.

00:11:27Now, there's a couple
cool things about the SSL.

00:11:30I don't know that
they're cool things or not,
but one of the cool things is it has
this cool Auto Fade function.

00:11:35And,
what it's really gonna do
is just turn the fader down
faster than I could do it.

00:11:40Why would I want to do that?
Well, to be honest with you,
there's a bunch of noisy
analog shit going on here,
and it would be cool
if the track just went *sound*
down to a nice, quiet...

00:11:51As close to digital black
as we can possibly get.

00:11:53You know, this is the kind of thing that,
when these consoles made noise like that,
it didn't matter because it was on records
and records had a noise floor,
and then the cassette tapes
had a noise floor.

00:12:03Then everybody went to CDs
and it was like,
"Well, why is there all this
noisy shit going on?"
And the funny thing is, it's like,
I kind of like all of that noise,
I like the noise between tracks,
I like the noise floor.
It's cool.

00:12:16Whatever.

00:12:17Alright, so, let's hear
what this is like.

00:12:19I'm gonna come out
of my Dim mode here
and I'm just gonna try a couple
of these Auto Fades.

00:13:37It's gonna play in a little bit,
gonna load up the automation.

00:13:41I hit Setup, Mix, Execute.

00:13:43It's gonna go into a mode
called Absolute,
which is the one that I like.

00:13:47All the red lights, everywhere.

00:13:49I'll make sure that things are muted
the way I want them.

00:13:52Anything that needs to be muted is muted,
anything that needs to be on is on.

00:13:56And then, I hit Execute.

00:13:58It loads.

00:13:59Over here you see
the VCA levels of the system.

00:14:03I hit Play,
and we are running.

00:14:08So, we're gonna just run a static pass.

00:14:11We'll just let it play,
nothing else,
we're just going to write
a bunch of numbers
into this ancient computer system.

00:14:19A couple things that I did
while that was going on there:
I set the computer
to read the Master Fader,
turned that on, and then there is
a Fader Status Master.

00:14:28When you put it in Master Fader mode,
you hit the Fader Status Master.

00:14:31That changes the fader from playback,
or repro, or just automation.

00:14:35Even though it's not writing,
I need the Absolute,
so I wrote some automation in there
to do the Auto Fade.

00:14:40So now, every time I play it back
it will be exactly the same every time.

00:14:43It will do it every time.

00:14:45While it was playing back,
I came upon the concept that I think
on the last chorus
I want the long echoes
because he is doing
the long 'aftershock.'
Okay, so I'm gonna write
some automation here for this vocal,
I'm just gonna add
this long vocal to this intro.

00:15:00So, basically what I have to do is
I have to just punch into the automation.

00:15:46So now, I'm gonna do...

00:15:50...this 'cause of you, cause of you.'
I'm gonna change the way
the tone of those are.

00:16:15Cool, and that's how you write
the automation in the SSL,
by just punching into it
using these little light buttons.

00:16:22There's different ways to do it,
there's two different modes
that the SSL has:
there's the Trim automation,
and there's Absolute automation.

00:16:30I'm an old Flying Faders guy
and Absolute makes
total sense to me.

00:16:33Of course, the faders don't move,
so how do you know
where the faders are?
Well, there's a couple
ways to do it.

00:16:39One of them is you hit
Mix on the computer
and then you hit
Fader Status Master.

00:16:44The fader will tell you,
up or down,
where all these faders are
by the green blinking lights.

00:16:49You can just pick a spot here.

00:16:51I'll just play it back.

00:16:53Okay, I wanna see where
Tyler's vocal is now.

00:16:55I know I haven't moved it,
but I'm gonna move it now.

00:16:58So, I hit Mix,
I hit the Status button.

00:17:00It tells me green,
it means you gotta turn it up.

00:17:04I turn it up, and there it is.

00:17:05There's our null point,
right there.

00:17:07In other words, that's where it is.
Hello, please.

00:17:10I hit Mix again and it goes away.

00:17:11Now, it's not like Pro Tools where
you just touch it and you move it,
or Flying Faders, where you
just touch it and move it.

00:17:17This is... This is a mode
that's SSL kind-of-only.

00:17:21There is a mode called Auto Takeover
that is actually pretty cool.

00:17:25You put it in Auto Takeover,
and then, when you're
doing your automation,
when you punch out,
it tells you whether you need
to go up to hit the null.

00:17:34As you go up to hit the null,
when you hit the null,
it punches out of record
so you can go back
to where you were.

00:17:40We've done our first pass
on the computer.

00:17:42The best thing to do is hit End
and type in the name of the mix.

00:17:48Static.

00:17:50It's a static pass.

00:17:51It only has mute automation,
that's all I did,
that's all I wanted to do,
it's just mute automation.

00:17:56Cool.

00:17:57Alright, so now,
to load the automation,
I go here on the iPad,
the iPad Control.

00:18:05Memory Location, SSL Start, Play.

00:18:09Boom! It comes up.

00:18:11And I type in - because this
was made for tape -
Play Mix From Here.

00:18:16It means from the place...

00:18:18...'here' is.

00:18:19I just told it where 'here' was.

00:18:22There it is.

00:18:23Alright, cool.

00:18:24So now I can
push this computer over here a little bit.

00:18:28I don't really want that here.

00:18:30And then, I tend to have
an extra keyboard around,
one of these little wireless keyboards,
and I'll set it down here.

00:18:37Now, why do I do this?
Well, because if I'm here
in the middle of the desk,
I can play it from here.

00:18:42The automation is playing,
the track is going to play,
we are in mode.

00:18:48I'm gonna start from over here,
I can start from here,
I can start from over here.

00:19:58I'll call this 'Intro Start.'
Cool. And we're gonna
play it from there.

00:20:08And I'm gonna manipulate
a little bit these...

00:20:13...intro tracks.

00:21:57Okay, so what I just did
is I
started from the top of the track
and I just sort of rode
this weird thing going on,
and then I rode Tyler's guitar up.

00:22:08So it's just the intro,
Tyler's guitar up
so that his guitar opens the track.

00:22:13I pulled the bass down
so that when the bass came in
it wasn't quite so bombastic.

00:22:17And then, you know,
fed the bass up slowly.

00:22:20This took a couple passes to do.

00:22:22And then the solo,
that solo master fader
that had the weird
backwards thing going on,
I found its point that it was at
by hitting Mix and matching,
and then I put the fader
at that point,
and then I matched
where I wanted
the fader to come in,
where the solo was,
by just doing a fake run of it.

00:22:44So, I hit Play,
and as the solo was going along
I could see where the fader was,
I matched it, and punched into it.

00:22:52So, now, the automation is here,
and then right as the solo came in,
I punched out,
which was at the level I wanted it.

00:23:00So now that automation is *sounds*
Boom! Moves.

00:23:04We're gonna now target
mixing the lead vocal
just in the verse.

00:23:08Just finding the balance
of the lead vocal in the verse.

00:23:28So, this is about the mark
where I want it to start.

00:23:32I'm gonna punch in
the automation right here.

00:24:02Once I kind of get
through this first chorus,
I'm gonna be doing...

00:24:05This is what I would call, again,
sort of like big strokes.

00:24:09Just to try to get the balance
of the chorus there and the vocal.

00:24:12Now I'm gonna do the next verse,
just gonna keep moving on here.

00:24:23Alright, cool.

00:24:25So now,
here is what I would normally do:
right about somewhere in here,
I save this.

00:24:33I usually save it by time.

00:24:36So it's...

00:24:37it's that time.

00:24:45Saves the mix by time.

00:24:50Here's the deal when comparing
two bus compressors, alright?
So this is the API 2500,
that's what we have been
listening to all this time.

00:24:58And then I am gonna turn it off,
and then hit the SSL,
adjust it so it's doing
about the same thing,
and then we can switch
between them.

00:25:09So, I will tell you a few things.

00:25:10One, I'm gonna do the Attack
at about 10 ms,
4:1,
and the Release is gonna be
at three tenths of a second.

00:25:17Now, the reason I am doing that
is that that's very close to the API.

00:25:23I've actually found
that there's another setting
that works really well for this
that doesn't make any sense whatsoever,
but it actually sounds pretty good.

00:25:32And that is 10:1,
and the Release time up at 30,
and then just turn it back
until it does 2 or 3 dB,
and it actually is pretty cool.

00:25:43This is a setting that Richard Dodd
was telling me about.

00:25:46So, I'm gonna just turn this up here.

00:26:22I'm gonna play this,
I'm gonna let 4 or 8 bars go by.

00:26:25The API will be first,
the SSL will be second.

00:26:28So here we go.

00:27:10When I'm listening to the API,
I hear the top end more open.

00:27:15In the top end,
the SSL is a little more closed up.

00:27:19The SSL is a little more
glued together than the API.

00:27:22I'm totally good with that
because this is gonna go
to a great mastering engineer
who is gonna add some,
you know, obviously some
compression and some limiting,
and really make the track
feel really good.

00:27:34So I'd rather it have more dynamics,
more transients than less.

00:27:39And to me, the SSL
is a little bit of that...

00:27:42A little too much control.

00:27:44I kind of like the API
doing what it's doing.

00:27:47They're both doing about the same
amount of compression
when I look at the meters,
and they both seem
to be pretty balanced.

00:27:54So, you know,
again, one man's 'boy howdys'
is another man's 'far out.'
One man's 'oh geez,'
another man's 'WTF,'
some very smart man once told me.

00:28:03And so, your mileage may vary.

00:28:05Whatever works for you
is what you should use.

00:28:09That's what I'm using,
but whatever works for you
is what you should use.

00:28:13So, now what we're gonna do
is I'm gonna turn the volume up,
change back to the ProAcs.

00:28:20And normally this would be
where I've kind of done these moves,
a lot of, you know,
small moves,
some little moves,
but for grand moves, I'm gonna get
the band's involvement.

00:28:30They're gonna come in and take a listen.

00:28:33So, let's get the band guys in here.

00:28:35Come on in, boys!
And, I'm gonna put it up again
to about 100 dB, something like that.

00:28:40A good, solid Rock 'n' Roll level.

00:28:43I'm gonna let the guys sit here.

00:28:45I'm gonna get a water,
gonna stand back there
in the back of the room
and pace around
because that's what I do,
while they listen.

00:36:58Cool! Now,
so, one of the things
we always have to do
is we have to do versions.

00:37:03So, what's gonna happen here
is Mike's gonna print some versions,
because it's usually where I go and,
you know,
go away, leave for a while,
and put my head back on.

00:37:16We're gonna print a Master,
we're gonna print an Instrumental,
we're gonna print a Television Mix
- that's the instrumental
plus the background vocals -
we're gonna print a Vocal Up mix,
up seven-tenths,
all vocals up seven-tenths,
and all vocals down seven-tenths,
and a Lead Vocal Stem.

00:37:34Those are our prints.

00:37:36That's what I like to print.

00:37:37Basically, I have yet to come
across a mastering situation
that those will not cover.

00:37:43So that's what we're gonna print.

00:37:46Then, while that's happening,
Mike's gonna go around,
he's gonna take the iPad here,
and he's gonna take photographs
of all the outboard gear
used in the mix.

00:37:55We have a pro database
that I designed,
that does all the patching.

00:37:59He'll update that
if he hasn't already updated.

00:38:01You can actually update it
on the iPad, strangely enough.

00:38:04It's pretty bizarre.

00:38:05I can hit Sputnik Recall,
and it will come up
the exact same thing over here.

00:38:10And, you can just type it in here.

00:38:13All of the photographs that are in here
are categorized by mix,
and those will upload to the cloud
and just show up in My Photos
setting for here.

00:38:24It works really well!
It's a situation that works.

00:38:27We can do a recall in under
20 minutes, pretty much.

00:38:30The other thing that takes
the longest time
is really just resetting the desk,
and Mike's gotten really good at that.

00:38:36Thanks for everything,
thanks for watching,
thanks for listening,
and, be good.

00:38:42Talk soon!

Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.

Vance studied eletrical engineering in Misouri and started his carreer in live sound as a front-of-house engineer. In 2002, he moved to Nashville in order to become studio manager and chief engineer at the legendary Black Bird studios in Nashville. In 2006, he co-founded Sputnik studios along with Grammy winning engineer Mitch Dane, still in Nashville.

Vance Powell has won 6 Grammy awards working with rock artists such as The Raconteurs, Kings of Leon, Jack White, Pearl Jam, The White Stripes, The Dead Weather and more.

Powell's domain of expertise is definitely mixing and producing rock music. As shown in his pureMix videos, Vance likes to experiment and create new fuller and exciting sounds using all kinds of pedals, echos, analog outboards and plug-ins. Vance was used to recording to tape and definitely has an analog approach that makes him commit to fewer good sounding tracks rather than piling up takes in Pro Tools.

His goal is to make something new and warm that fits the band's vision with upfront snare drums and powerful guitars. Rocking.

Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown is a rock and roll band born of Nashville, TN. Their sound is a soulful patchwork of roots-infused melodies and muscular riffs, all woven tightly with the thread of their alternative psychedelic mystique. It’s as rambunctious, raw and real as rock & roll gets these days.

Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown is a rock and roll band born of Nashville, TN. Their sound is a soulful patchwork of roots-infused melodies and muscular riffs, all woven tightly with the thread of their alternative psychedelic mystique. It’s as rambunctious, raw and real as rock & roll gets these days.

I watched this video and the Recording of this song videos a few times. I mixed the song myself in Pro Tools using the Tracks provided here. I just could not achieve the definition and pressure the final CD version sounds like. I had no Idea what I was doing wrong. Then I compared the final mix Vance is printing at the end of the video. It sounds pretty similar to mine. The mastering engineer must have done a LOT to the song. I sounds way different than the final mix. Who was the mastering engineer. He or she did an amazing job.

MarcoPolo

2018 Sep 15

Really enjoyed this entire soup-to-nuts series with Vance. Entertaining and educational, all at once. Thanks for this!

RUBBER MAN

2017 Nov 20

If you do rock (which is all I do) this tutorial is extremely helpful. I thought I was nuts using pedals as outboard effects while mixing- not anymore. This tutorial is really going to help my OTB technique and of course just great solid technique shown here from a master.

composermikeglaser

2017 Nov 03

Vance's parallels add so much life to the track! Great tutorial.

StudioSaturn

2017 Nov 01

OK I have listen the song on Spotify and I realised that on this tutorial The Drum is glorious than the original track which is released on Spotify. How is that happen?

StudioSaturn

2017 Nov 01

It is a pleasure to watch this Video. Pure awesomeness! I felt my ear got goosebumps cause of happiness. This tutorial is a true example of taking care of what we need on tracking stage than on mixing. Loving it! keep it coming. Glorious tutorial. Thank you so much!

EBMusic

2017 Oct 29

Great mix video, too bad we don't have enough explanations on the settings of reverb and delay who make a big deal in the mix in my opinion. By the way, the mix here is better than the album version

brady_d79

2017 Oct 28

Great mix vid, even if you don't have an SSL and all the hardware. Kinda wish he mentioned what ipad app he uses for controlling Pro Tools and what his SPL meter app was...